Mass, forced, and forced migrations occupy a certain place in the history of the peoples of the USSR in the 1930s and 1940s. Dictated perhaps by strategic goals, those deportations of the Baltic peoples also reverberated in distant Kazakhstan. Compared with the deportations of Poles, Germans, and Koreans, this aspect has been little studied in Russian historiography. The research aims to reconstruct the history of deportation based on archival data, to rethink the events of the recent past in a modern interpretation, to identify poorly understood aspects of the problem. Sources from the archives of the Republic of Kazakhstan (AP RK, GASCO, GAKO, etc.) and post-Soviet states, in particular the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), etc., were used. Information about the deportees and their fates is partially presented in published collections of official Soviet materials and eyewitness memoirs, on the pages of periodicals and search sites. Results. The article presents the results of an analysis of the prehistory of the process of mass repeated deportation of residents of the Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian and Karelo-Finnish SSR to other republics, including Kazakhstan. The chronological framework of the study covers the pre-war, military and post-war period; within the specified range, the socio-cultural aspects of the topic are reflected, if possible. The article analyzes historically determined trends towards empathy and intercultural communication between deportees, on the one hand, and ordinary Kazakhs, on the other. The article also highlights modern aspects of cooperation between states to perpetuate the memory of the tragedy of the deportation on June 14, which became a symbolic date in the history of the Baltic peoples.